The Dissonance of Being Mainstreamed

I grew up ashamed of my Korean culture. Now the world can't get enough of it.

I grabbed coffee the other day with a friend who asked me excitedly if I’d seen K-Pop Demon Hunters. Despite it now being the #1 Netflix movie of all time, I had to tell her that no, I hadn’t seen it yet. Weeks later, I still haven’t.

If I’m being perfectly honest, I’ve been avoiding it.

Bad Korean, I know. I should be the first to celebrate Korean accomplishments, and normally I do—like two years ago when Blackpink became the first K-Pop group to headline Coachella; or two years before that, when Squid Games became the most watched show in the world; or a year before that, when I shed tears as Youn Yuh-jung became the first Korean to win an Oscar and Parasite the first foreign film to win Best Picture.

At first it felt gratifying, and a little vindicating. At long last, our tiny little motherland was getting its moment in the spotlight. And then seemingly overnight, Korea was everywhere: BTS bumping over the speakers in Trader Joe’s; NYT recipes cooking gochujang into everything from caramel cookies to buttered noodles, and influencers (white ones!) on TikTok telling me how to get glass skin and make a banana milk iced latte at GS25.

If Korea were a person, this would be the height of her fame. Global recognition. Mainstream status. It should feel like a triumph.

So why does it feel so strange instead?

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I suppose a large part of that answer lies in where I grew up. I was born and raised in Yorktown, Virginia, a town known solely for its significance in the Revolutionary War. In 2000, the year I turned nine, the population there was 91.79% white, 6.67% Black, and 0.51% Asian. One of my earliest memories of childhood is being chased home from the bus stop by a freckle-faced terror taunting, “Ching chong!” with his fingers pulling at the corners of his eyes.

By middle school I heard the message loud and clear: being Asian was undesirable, and even, I learned, unsettling. Why do they all hang out together? kids would ask me, referring to the dozen or so Koreans who always sat at one long lunch table. It never dawned on me to retort back, How come all the white kids sit together and nobody asks why?

But even my own parents reinforced this sense that we were out of place. They had a rule: no doenjang, kimchi, or garlic 24 hours before any event. The smell, my mom explained, was offensive to Americans. It seeps out of our skin. I pictured orange kimchi juice sloshing out of my pores like some sick sci-fi scene. We had to be extra careful, she complained, because of those “other” Koreans—the ajummas who yelled loudly in Korean across the aisles of Costco and their husbands who smacked their food with open mouths and never said “Excuse me.” My mom was convinced these Koreans gave the rest of us a bad name. I didn’t know how to tell her that to white people, we all looked and sounded the same.

It wasn’t until college, when I met NoVa Asians (short for Northern Virginia) for the first time, that I realized this racial pecking order wasn’t the default everywhere. These kids had grown up in communities full of other Asians—so many in fact, that there was a variety. Not just Korean or Chinese, but Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian. They had been class presidents, cheerleaders, football players, and homecoming queens. The discovery that in other places, Asians weren’t simply tolerated, but fully accepted into the fold both amazed and unsettled me. The only way I knew how to fit into white spaces was as a token, and I’d spent all my time in high school perfecting how to play that role.

Despite this new discovery, it was difficult to undo years of conditioning that had convinced me white friends had more value than Asian ones. So I rushed a white sorority, and slipped into the part I’d always known to play: I made self-deprecating jokes about filling their diversity quota; I co-opted the nickname “Harey” and took it as a compliment when frat boys told me I was hot “for an Asian.” Regardless of what I had to compromise, I reveled in feeling like I finally belonged.

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My entire adolescence had been one long negotiation for acceptance: shrinking, tokenizing, trying on and discarding different versions of myself well into my twenties, until I finally stopped measuring my worth by my proximity to whiteness and learned to love myself on my own terms.

Maybe that’s why this mainstreaming feel so jarring.

To think I used to eat with my lunchbox hidden under the table so the smell of seaweed in my kimbap wouldn’t offend my classmates. Now Trader Joe’s sells a frozen version that sells out in minutes.

To think I used to pray to god I’d wake up with a better face, a more angular one—and to help him along, I’d pinch my nose bridge until I fell asleep (a trick a girl at church told me could make our flat noses taller). Now K-beauty is the golden standard.

Seeing my culture in the hands of a world who made me feel like less than for so long, I feel a childish impulse to snatch it back and cry, “You said you didn’t like it!” Because the thing I once had to be simultaneously protective and ashamed of has suddenly been claimed by the very people I felt I had to hide it from.

And if it can be theirs now, can I still call it mine?

We’ve seen this phenomenon before. Hip-hop rose from block parties in the Bronx, a language of survival and resistance in Black and Latino neighborhoods, only to become the most consumed genre in the world. Today it drives billion-dollar industries—fashion, advertising, global streaming charts—yet as Michelle Alexander reminds us in The New Jim Crow, the U.S. imprisons more Black men today than were enslaved in 1850. The same country that claims hip-hop as its cultural export also cages the largest population of Black people in the world.

I don’t find this parallel extreme. History has shown time and time again that under the white gaze, cultures are extracted from their creators—exoticized, commodified, and discarded when they are no longer of use. Case in point: when COVID-19 hit, Asians in America became targets overnight, and we saw just how conditional the West’s acceptance of us really was. Public figures and news outlets invoked labels like “China virus” and “kung flu,” and hate crimes against Asians increased by 145% in a single year. We became a monolith of sickness, painted with a single brush stroke regardless of where we were really “from.”

I’m aware of how bitter I sound, which is why I’ve also interrogated the possibility that my uneasiness is simply a vestige of that little girl who never felt accepted—that this is a reaction borne out of resentment, a sign I have more to heal when it comes to my inner child.

Or maybe my concerns are valid. Because despite how widely Korean food and art and media and culture is celebrated and adored, I can’t help but worry what will still remain as ours when the world is done consuming us.